Friday Apple Rumors: MS Office 365 Subscribers Get iOS App

by Christopher Freeburn | June 14, 2013 12:19 pm

Friday Apple Rumors: MS Office 365 Subscribers Get iOS App

[1]Here are your Apple rumors[2] and AAPL news items for today:

Restricted: A mobile version of Microsoft‘s (MSFT[3]) popular Office Suite has finally arrived[4] on Apple‘s (AAPL[5]) iPhone, MacRumors notes. The software giant has released Office Mobile, an app designed to work only on the iPhone, that allows users to open and edit Excel, PowerPoint and Word files on their phones. However, the new app only works if the user subscribes to Microsoft’s Office 365 service. The app, which can be downloaded without charge from the App Store, can retrieve and save data to Microsoft’s SkyDrive cloud storage service and can sync with other devices to provide access to updated documents. Rumors have persisted for months that Microsoft would release an iOS app for its Office programs.

Building: The number of iTunes accounts[6] is rising by 500,000 every day, AppleInsider notes. That estimate comes from Asymco analyst Horace Dediu who analyzed iTunes account growth history. At its Worldwide Developer Conference in San Francisco earlier this week, Apple CEO Tim Cook announced that the company now has more than 575 million iTunes accounts. Dediu forecasts that Apple will add another 100 million iTunes accounts before the close of 2013. Other analysts have speculated that Apple could leverage its expanding iTunes account base to promote additional services. Only Facebook (FB[7]) has more online customer accounts. iTunes also tops rival Amazon (AMZN[8]) in terms of its share of music, movie and TV show downloads.

Indifference: Testifying in Apple’s price-fixing trial in a New York City court[9] on Thursday, Apple Senior Vice President Eddy Cue said that Apple “didn’t care” about the prices of e-books sold through its iBookstore, Reuters notes. The government is suing Apple for allegedly conspiring with five publishing companies to set e-book prices. All five publishers have settled with the Department of Justice, but Apple denies the charges and is fighting the lawsuit. Cue told the court that e-book price increases following Apple’s 2010 entry to the e-book market didn’t surprise him. But he insisted that the company had nothing to do with the price hikes. Cue also testified that he negotiated deals with the publishers under increasing pressure to get the iBookstore up and running in time for the iPad’s debut because he knew that Apple’s late CEO Steve Jobs was “near the end of his life” and wanted the iBookstore to launch with the iPad. The iBookstore competes with Amazon’s Kindle e-book market, which controlled 90% of the e-book market around the time the iPad debuted. Cue noted that Apple had considered Amazon’s pricing model, but later decided to allow publishers set pricing and take a 30% commission from sales.

For more about the company, check out our previous Apple Rumors[10] stories.